I find myself more and more going to ask AI instead of going to man pages or docs, or even specialized books on these topics these days. How would you also as an author compete against that?
Ask HN: Did AI just kill the books Industry?
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Re: Ask HN: Did AI just kill the books Industry?
#2LLMs do not generate new content, they just shuffle old content together in new ways. So no, it does not kill an industry of people creating new original content. And authors only need to worry about it if they were not adding anything new to the world to begin with, and were instead relying on marketing to sell re-packaged existing content.
Re: Ask HN: Did AI just kill the books Industry?
#3Books exist for people who want in depth information with the full context, in an organized manner.
Short forms have always been available, it be blog posts, Wikipedia articles, cliff notes, or other such things. Books survive, because source material is needed to generate all of those other things, and those short form versions don’t cut it for everyone. I don’t see LLMs as any different.
A book can tell you something you didn’t know. With an LLM you need to know enough to ask.
Re: Ask HN: Did AI just kill the books Industry?
#4Authors compete by being competent, doing research, and outputting factual information. Or just, you know, being original. In a world where LLMs can’t even differentiate between a recipe and an old Reddit joke and tell you to put glue on pizza, it is absurd to think they “killed the book industry”.
What’s with this bloody obsession of killing other products and industries? Every time someone farts in tech, everyone starts shouting that it just killed something else. Calm down. Relax a little bit and get some perspective. You’re drowning yourself in the Kool-Aid.
LLMs did not kill the book industry, just like Bitcoin did not kill the world’s financial system.
Re: Ask HN: Did AI just kill the books Industry?
#5I think you might be confusing different activities that look similar.
Search, research, exploratory reading, browsing, fact checking, cross
referencing, debunking, genealogy, making etymological and
epistemological connections are all different things. As an author and
researcher I produce and consume a lot more types of connections and
paths than a simple neural net that can make fast associations on past
training material can offer. YMMV.
Re: Ask HN: Did AI just kill the books Industry?
#6Books exist for people who want in depth information with the full context, in an organized manner. Short forms have always been available, it be blog posts, Wikipedia articles, cliff notes, or other such things. Books survive, because source material is needed to generate all of those other things, and those short form versions don’t cut it for everyone. I don’t see LLMs as any different. A book can tell you somethi…
Yeah I completely agree with this! I really like books for learning because they do exactly this.
Take the Rust book, you have a neat and organised collection of the majority of Rust features you're likely to use.
An LLM might be handy in answering questions like "Why is the borrow checker failing this code?" but that's a really different proposition to getting a detailed and complete summary of Rust's key features. It could maybe output something along these lines, but I think the output would be considerably less usable and reliable than a book.
Re: Ask HN: Did AI just kill the books Industry?
#7The smell of paper, ink and binding glue.
The feel of quality paper.
The way the spine cracks when you first open a book.
The way the spine creases after you've read a book a few times.
Re: Ask HN: Did AI just kill the books Industry?
#8The smell of paper, ink and binding glue. The feel of quality paper. The way the spine cracks when you first open a book. The way the spine creases after you've read a book a few times.
While that’s compelling to many…
https://tapas.io/episode/516960
… it’s not really the subject of the question. The trend is more people moving to digital books, and those will be the most common first interactions people have. Those qualities you mention are nostalgic, like the sound of vinyl…
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?attachmen...
… and will go by the wayside as more of the people who care die.
Re: Ask HN: Did AI just kill the books Industry?
#9LLMs do not generate new content, they just shuffle old content together in new ways. So no, it does not kill an industry of people creating new original content. And authors only need to worry about it if they were not adding anything new to the world to begin with, and were instead relying on marketing to sell re-packaged existing content.
As we progress into our inevitable AI future, I have to wonder whether good source materials (like books) will more or less die out and AI-generated content will be shuffled so much that it’s nonsensical and useless, thereby kicking off a new cycle of human-generated output.
I never left RSS but social media like TikTok and X have me wondering if I’m ever reading human output or I’m just consuming and interacting with AI systems.
I recently had a very red-pill dystopian experience where I figured out someone I interacted with on X was an AI. It slipped up on a response that I recognized as a common LLM idiom. Further inquiries confirmed. It turns out that a lot of X in particular is AI bots.
Re: Ask HN: Did AI just kill the books Industry?
#10LLMs do not generate new content, they just shuffle old content together in new ways. So no, it does not kill an industry of people creating new original content. And authors only need to worry about it if they were not adding anything new to the world to begin with, and were instead relying on marketing to sell re-packaged existing content.
As we progress into our inevitable AI future, I have to wonder whether good source materials (like books) will more or less die out and AI-generated content will be shuffled so much that it’s nonsensical and useless, thereby kicking off a new cycle of human-generated output. I never left RSS but social media like TikTok and X have me wondering if I’m ever reading human output or I’m just consuming and interacting wit…
I suspect 80% of my X followers are AI bots.